I'll admit right from the start that I am not an MMA/UFC fan, so I have no idea who these people are. However, I know that the UFC and mixed martial arts are important to people not just in the U.S. but also in other parts of the world, which means that they impact the social tapestry. Popular culture is a barometer of an evolving national mentality.
According to The Blaze, MMA fighter Bryce Mitchell recently held forth on his "ArkanSanity" podcast, opining about Adolf Hitler. Opting to rely on his own research and not his "public education indoctrination," Mitchell was quick to sing Hitler's praises, which included this observation:
[He] fought for his country; he wanted to purify it by kicking the greedy Jews out that were destroying his country and turning them all into gays. They were gaying out the kids; they were queering out the women; they were queering out the dudes.
Mitchell was also of the mind that had Hitler not gotten hooked on methamphetamine, he would have been, and I quote, a "guy to go fishing with." The online magazine MMA Fighting reported that Mitchell also denied that the Holocaust happened, stating, "There’s no possible way they could’ve burned and cremated 6 million bodies; you’re going to realize the Holocaust ain’t real.” No, not all of the bodies were incinerated. Some people were buried in mass graves after being shot or worked to death. Some were sent to Mengele's house of horrors. Others simply disappeared.
Someone clue me in: does this sport's governing body not require some sort of head protection? During a Thursday press conference, UFC President Dana White took Mitchell to the woodshed, starting with, “I’ve heard a lot of dumb and ignorant s**t said over the years, but this is probably the worst.” White then soundly berated Mitchell for his ignorance surrounding the Third Reich and World War II. White concluded:
Second of all, Hitler is one of the most disgusting and evil human beings to ever walk the Earth, and anyone that even tries to take an opposing position is a moron. That’s the problem with the internet and social media. You provide a platform to a lot of dumb and ignorant people. We reached out to Bryce immediately when we read what he said, and let him know exactly how we felt about it. But what he said was beyond disgusting, and he needs a real education on the facts surrounding Hitler and WWII.
By Saturday, Mitchell had posted his apology on Instagram:
Interestingly, White said that Mitchell would not be released from UFC and that the organization would not police the speech of its members. As odious and ignorant as Mitchell's comments may have been, the First Amendment allows him to make them. The same holds for luminaries like Tucker Carlson:
Anyone still blind to what Tucker is doing is willfully so. He isn’t hiding it.
— Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing) February 1, 2025
When a man has worse things to say about Winston Churchill and Ben Shapiro than Vladimir Putin and Nazi apologists, he’s making his position pretty clear. https://t.co/V0zcv2aWEx
One of the reasons free speech matters is because while most of us may be able to get together on Mitchell's stupidity, and some may butt heads over the war between Israel and Hamas, there are always those who want to be the arbiters of free speech for their own purposes, including political or financial reasons or simply for the sake of social supremacy. Conservatives learned over the last eight years just how far those self-appointed arbiters will go. So free speech must remain free, even when it is not well-reasoned, inflammatory, or just plain stupid.
Secondly, we combat bad ideas and ignorance with good ideas and knowledge. Mitchell may be a garden-variety lunkhead, but by letting his thoughts see the light of day, honest brokers can engage him and others like him. Discussions, like the one between Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan, are also integral to free speech — debate matters.
Finally, the fact that Mitchell was so willing to walk down the slum-ridden streets of Holocaust denial, which appears to be the product of crap he read on the internet, says a great deal about our country at the moment. We seem to be in a place where history is what people want it to be, not what it actually is.
When I was a kid, watching movies like "The Longest Day," "A Bridge Too Far," and "Midway" was the catalyst for sending me to the local library to sit down and read books about the Second World War. I won't suggest that any of those movies as replacements for actual studies, but they set off an interest in history. I read the accounts and saw the photograph, which taught me not only about the Nazi atrocities but the mindset and socio-political climate that allowed them to flourish.
In high school, teachers taught us actual civics as opposed to subjecting us to indoctrination. We learned world and U.S. history with plain, unvarnished facts. Moreover, I met the grandparents of my high school buddies. Some of those grandparents had numbers tattooed on their arms. We need to teach and remember these things because ideas like the ones in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Mao's China always come back. They may look and sound slightly different than their previous incarnations, but they always come back.
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